As she still did not answer, he looked up, and their eyes met. Once meeting, they could not quit each other. Diana's gaze was sad enough, but eager with the eagerness of long hunger. His was sharp with pain at first, keen with unreasonable anger; one of the mind's resorts from unbearable torment. Then as he looked it changed and grew soft; and finally, springing up, he went over to where she sat, dropped on his knees before her, and seizing her hands kissed them one after the other till tears began to mingle with the kisses. She was passive; she could not drive him off; she felt that she and he must have this one moment to bury their past in; it was only when her hands were growing wet with his tears that she roused herself to an effort. "Evan--Evan--listen to me! You mustn't--remember, I am a man's wife." "How could you?" "I did not know what I was doing." "Have you given up loving me?" "What is the use of talking of it, Evan? I am another man's wife." "But there are such things as divorces." "Hush! Do not speak of such a thing." "I must speak of it. Whom do you love? tell me that first." "No one has a right to ask me such a question." "_I_ have a right," cried the young man; "for I have been deceived, cheated, robbed of my own; and I have a right to get back my own. Diana, speak! do you love me less than you used to do? Tell me that." "I do not change, Evan." "Then you have no business to be anybody's wife but mine. Nothing can hinder _that_, Diana." "Stop! You are not to speak so. I will not hear it." "You are mine, Diana." "I _was_ yours, Evan!" she said tenderly, bending her head over him till her lips touched his hair. "We have been parted, and it is over--over for this world. You must go your way, and I must go mine. And you must not say, I am ruined." "Do not you say it?" "I must not." "It is the truth for me, if I do not have you with me." "It is not the truth," she said with infinite tenderness in her manner. "Not ruined, Evan. We can go our way and do our work, even if we are not happy. _That_ is another thing." "Then you are not happy?" he said eagerly. Diana did not reply. "Why should we not be happy?" he went on passionately, looking up now into her face. "You are mine, Diana--you belonged to me first, you have been mine all along; only I have been robbed of you;--pure robbery; nothing else. And has not a man a right to his own, wherever and whenever he finds it? You had given yourself first to me. That is irrevocable." "No"--she said with the same gentleness, in every tone of which lurked an unutterable sorrow; it would have broken her husband's heart to hear her; and yet she was quiet, so quiet that she awed the young officer a little. "No--I had promised to give myself to you; that is all." "You gave me your heart, Di?" She was silent, for at the moment she could not speak "Di!"--he insisted. "Yes." "That is enough. That is all." "It is not all. Since then I have"--